With so many millions of books lying around the planet, it's no surprise that artists and designers like Thilo Folkerts of 100 Landschaftsarchitektur and Rodney LaTourelle from Canada have been using them as materials in creative projects. In 2010, the pair constructed the Jardin de la Connaissance in Quebec using hundreds of books stacked to make walls and benches that will eventually become absorbed by the surrounding forest. Two years on and giant mushrooms are starting to sprout from the decaying books.

Folkerts and LaTourelle have been helping to speed up the decaying installation originally designed as part of the International Festival des Jardins de Metis. While some fungi has appeared on its own, the pair are cultivating large, vibrant mushrooms between the pages and have recently begun to introduce moss graffiti to the garden as well! (If you love moss graffiti as much as we do, you can create your own with this nifty DIY tutorial.)

The garden of fading books provides a wonderful habitat for fauna too as a variety of insects have made the stacks of books home. “Culture is fading back into nature,” the creative minds behind this experimental project have said, although they do not make any definitive claims that the experiment will go 100% according to plan. While the original decaying process is a little bit slow, we suspect that the project will progress faster within the next couple of years and the books will start to look more like these abandoned cars reclaimed by nature.